I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gadfest, The Grown Up Edition.

This is also the daily podcast from slate.com for Wednesday, June 4th, 2008.

On today's program, we're going to talk about the cavernous narcissism of Bill Clinton,

the whopping chick flick tsunami known as Sex in the City, and the force of entirely manufactured celebrity

known as Kimbo Slice. Joining me today are Slate's culture editor, Julia Turner. Hello, Julia. Hi. And our film

critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hi. So this past week Vanity Fair published a piece by its national correspondent, Todd Purdom, who used to cover the Clinton White House for the New York Times. His pieces about Bill Clinton, it's big, it's sprawling, it's dishy, it's, I think, fair to describe it as a takedown. Jack Schaefer has written about it for us in Slate. It is a tissue of blind quotes,

and it is also what's known in the profession as a write-around. He didn't actually have

access to Bill Clinton himself. I'm curious what we make of the piece, A, as a piece of journalism,

and B, as a document about our recent former president. Dana, what did you make of Purdom's

piece on Clinton? Well, you know, I think

you guys are going to say that I have a soft spot for the Clintons or something, but I swear,

as a journalist, my opinion is that it's a poorly sourced hatchet job and way too long,

pretty sleazy, and I'm kind of surprised that it ran in Vanity Fair. It actually points

to the side of Vanity Fair that I don't like that makes me want to hurl the magazine across the room. There's other things about it that I do like, like James Wolcott's pieces, but I don't know if it's the editing, the writing. I don't know. Maybe the editor could weigh in on that, but it left me with it with icky feeling on my hands. Julia, what did you make of it? Well, it also just didn't have that much new, I didn't think.

Precisely.

It repeated a lot of accusations that have been made in the times about sort of the mysteriousness of his financial dealings and who the big donors have been to the Clinton Library and where exactly, you know, what exactly he's doing for the money he's earning from his friend Ron Berkel.

And then, you know, a couple of things that were new.

It named a bunch of rumors about Clinton and women, say, oh, maybe there's a woman in Chappaqua.

He's been seen at dinner with this woman from the Canadian Parliament or some such, some Canadian political figure.

Maybe he's having an affair with Gina Gershahn. It sort of named a bunch of things that have been floating in the ether that I haven't quite seen put down in such a reputable place before. And named is right, right? I mean, there's a sort of aura of insinuation without actual sort of what feels like ironclad sourcing. Nothing feels... Or of insinuation. Wait, I have a quote to read. Just very typical quote,

nothing even special about it, but typical of the piece. A public sighting of Clinton being one of his, you know, sleazy sidekicks, and a ravishing entourage of women, apparently, in a New York elevator that a former Clinton aide told me, this is Todd Purdam speaking, led a business leader who saw them to say,

I don't know what the guy was doing, but it was so clear that it was just no good.

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